The Enfield Poltergeist: Britain’s Most Documented Haunting

In August 1977, strange things began happening at 284 Green Street in Enfield, North London. What followed became one of the most thoroughly documented poltergeist cases in history, lasting over a year and witnessed by police officers, journalists, photographers, and experienced paranormal researchers. The phenomena centered on eleven-year-old Janet Hodgson and included furniture moving on its own, objects flying through the air, voices from nowhere, and apparent levitation.

The Beginning

Peggy Hodgson was a single mother raising four children in a small council house. In late August 1977, her daughters Janet, age eleven, and Margaret, age thirteen, complained that their beds were shaking at night. Peggy assumed the girls were playing tricks. Then she heard the sounds herself, a shuffling noise like someone sliding furniture across the floor. When she investigated, no one was there.

On the night of August 31, the family heard loud knocking on the walls. The sounds seemed to move through the house, as if something was walking along and rapping on surfaces as it went. Then a heavy dresser moved away from the wall on its own. Peggy pushed it back. It moved again, this time sliding far enough that she couldn’t push it back by herself.

Terrified, Peggy took her children next door to the Nottinghams. They could all hear the knocking coming through the walls. Vic Nottingham went into the Hodgson house to investigate and witnessed the knocking himself. He checked everywhere for an explanation and found none. He told Peggy to call the police.

Police Involvement

WPC Carolyn Heeps arrived at the house around midnight. As a trained police officer, she was skeptical of supernatural explanations. That skepticism lasted until she watched a chair slide across the floor by itself, moving several feet without anyone touching it. She saw it clearly. There was no string, no mechanism, no explanation. She signed a formal affidavit describing what she had witnessed.

The police could find no evidence of fraud or any normal explanation for the phenomena. The case was beyond their ability to handle, and they suggested the family contact someone who specialized in such matters.

The Society for Psychical Research

The Society for Psychical Research sent two investigators, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, to examine the case. Grosse, a newly trained investigator who had recently lost his daughter in a motorcycle accident, arrived first. He would spend the next year documenting what happened at Enfield.

Grosse and Playfair witnessed phenomena that challenged everything they thought they knew about the physical world. Furniture moved on its own. Objects flew through the air, sometimes around corners in ways that should have been physically impossible. The children were lifted from their beds. A heavy iron fireplace surround was ripped from the wall. Toys moved when no one was near them.

The investigators documented everything with photographs, recordings, and written notes. They brought in additional witnesses. They set up monitoring equipment. They tried to catch the children cheating and occasionally succeeded, but the phenomena continued even under the most controlled conditions.

Janet Hodgson

Janet Hodgson, the younger daughter, seemed to be the focus of the poltergeist activity. Phenomena occurred most frequently in her presence. She was also the most affected, experiencing apparent possession by an entity that spoke through her in a deep, masculine voice entirely different from her own.

The voice claimed to be Bill Wilkins, an elderly man who had died in the house years before. Speaking through Janet, the entity provided details about Bill’s life and death that could later be verified through public records. Bill had indeed lived and died in the house, passing away in a chair in the corner of the living room. Janet could not have known these details.

The voice was captured on audio recordings and witnessed by numerous observers. Janet’s lips barely moved when the entity spoke, and the voice seemed to come from somewhere deep in her chest. Voice experts who analyzed the recordings noted that producing such sounds should have been physically damaging to a young girl’s vocal cords, yet Janet showed no signs of injury.

Was Janet genuinely possessed? Was she unconsciously channeling something? Or was she a remarkable actress who somehow fooled trained investigators? The question has never been definitively answered.

The Phenomena

The range of phenomena reported at Enfield was extraordinary. Knocking and rappings were common, often responsive to questions in a yes/no format. Furniture moved frequently, sometimes violently. Objects flew through the air, including toys, books, and kitchen implements. The children were thrown from their beds.

Levitation was reported multiple times. Janet was apparently lifted from her bed and carried across the room. A photographer captured an image of Janet seemingly suspended in mid-air above her bed, though skeptics argue she could have been jumping. The photograph remains one of the most famous images from the case.

Physical marks appeared on the children, including scratches and pinches. Water pools formed on floors without apparent source. Graffiti appeared on walls. Small fires started spontaneously. The entity seemed capable of affecting nearly anything in its environment.

The Skeptics

The Enfield case has been extensively criticized by skeptics. Some of the phenomena were clearly faked by the children. Janet and Margaret were caught bending spoons themselves and hiding tape recorders to fake the phenomena. Janet later admitted that she and her sister had faked “about two percent” of the incidents, partly from boredom and partly to see if the investigators would notice.

This admission has been used to dismiss the entire case as fraud. However, investigators noted that they detected the faking immediately and that it occurred only during quiet periods when genuine phenomena were not happening. The children seemed almost compelled to perform, as if they had become addicted to the attention or felt pressure to produce results.

The genuine phenomena, investigators maintained, were quite different from the faked incidents. The faked events were obvious to experienced observers. The genuine events were not, involving phenomena that the children could not have produced through trickery, occurring in conditions that ruled out fraud.

The Investigation’s End

The poltergeist activity gradually diminished through 1978. By autumn, the phenomena had largely ceased. The family remained in the house, and normal life eventually resumed. Janet and Margaret grew up, married, and raised families of their own. Peggy Hodgson lived in the house until her death in 2003.

Maurice Grosse remained convinced until his death in 2006 that the Enfield case represented genuine poltergeist phenomena. Guy Lyon Playfair wrote an extensive book about the investigation and also maintained that what he witnessed could not be explained by fraud or natural causes.

Janet Hodgson has spoken publicly about her experiences as an adult. She stands by the reality of what happened, acknowledging the limited faking while insisting that the core phenomena were genuine. The voice that spoke through her, the furniture that moved, the levitation, these things happened, she maintains, whether anyone believes her or not.

Legacy

The Enfield Poltergeist became one of the most famous cases in paranormal history. It has been featured in countless books, documentaries, and television programs. The 2016 film “The Conjuring 2” dramatized a version of the events, bringing the story to a new generation of audiences.

The case remains controversial. For believers, it represents some of the best evidence for poltergeist phenomena ever collected, with multiple witnesses, extensive documentation, and phenomena that occurred under investigation. For skeptics, it represents a case of children fooling gullible investigators, with the admitted faking undermining any claims of genuine supernatural events.

The truth may be somewhere in between. Something happened at 284 Green Street that frightened a family and defied easy explanation. Whether that something was a genuine poltergeist, a psychological phenomenon manifesting physically, or an elaborate hoax that fooled experienced investigators remains a question each person must answer for themselves.

Conclusion

The house at 284 Green Street still stands in Enfield. Other families have lived there since the Hodgsons. None have reported anything unusual. Whatever visited that house in 1977 and 1978, whether spirit, poltergeist, or something else entirely, seems to have moved on.

Janet Hodgson grew up to live an ordinary life. The terrified eleven-year-old who seemed to channel the voice of a dead man became a wife and mother. She rarely speaks about what happened and prefers to leave the past behind.

But the recordings still exist. The photographs still exist. The testimonies of police officers, journalists, and investigators still exist. Something happened in that unremarkable council house that challenged the boundaries of what we think we know about reality.

Perhaps the furniture moved because of fraud and suggestion. Perhaps an unconscious psychokinetic ability manifested in a troubled young girl. Or perhaps, for one year in an ordinary London suburb, the wall between our world and something else grew thin enough for something to reach through.

The Enfield Poltergeist offers no easy answers. It only offers the testimony of those who were there and the invitation to decide for yourself what you believe.